Hacker News Reader

Comment by steveklabnik | Hacker News Reader

This is probably the most thorough public explanation of what we're doing over at Oxide.

Got a TL;DW for us? Video is 86 minutes long.

Basically they want to build rack scale computers with open/ auditable firmware all the way down and really design the hardware for "hyper-scale" like computing. That means, no VGA/ USB/ DVD on the server, power and networking will probably be solved for more servers at once, there will be APIs for all of the low level stuff that is probably inconsistent with your typical Dells, HPEs, Lenovos, SuperMicros.

I find, Bryan Cantrill talks are generally worth it to watch even just for entertainment if for nothing else.

I used to love listening to him, really.. (still remember his dtrace talk fondly) but this one was hard to focus on. Lots of uh ah hum. Surprising.

The sibling comment is good.

The problem that we're trying to solve is basically laid out on this slide: https://youtu.be/vvZA9n3e5pc?list=PLoROMvodv4rMWw6rRoeSpkise...

The business is "we will be selling servers." You can't buy any yet, but in the future, you'll be able to.

The talk lays out a history of servers, describes the problems with the servers that you can buy from vendors today, and lays out why we think we can build better ones.

Good luck, you will need lots of it.

To add to sibling comments, I think this endeavor involves RISC-V based hardware supported by Rust software. That info is buried deep within the talk, I scrubbed thru so YMMV.

The specific complaint I (and the GP) have is: synopsis, synopsis, synopsis. Give me a few paragraph summary before asking me to invest an hour and a half of my time.

Good luck/ "kick ass and have fun" while pushing computing forward. I applaud the effort to make the very foundations of computing more robust and introspectable. The most laudable goal seems to me to be especially the general accessibility of some of these achievements in the long run even to non-customers. Maybe, open and robust firmware will become the standard. Please also embrace IPv6 to prevent taking all the brokenness in that area (e.g. network boot, remote management) for the ride into the 21. century.

Thank you! It has been a lot of fun so far. My colleagues are some of the smartest, most helpful people I've ever worked with. I look forward to that future too :)

We will evaluate the next hardware generation at our company probably sometime in 2022-2023. I sure would love to get my hands on an Oxide computer :-) though I fear we are more in the 3-10x 2U rack computer area for most locations. This is probably the sizing for most businesses in middle Europe, e.g. Germany.

This is a great talk! I have to admit my first thought wasn't to the data center. Which is obviously the predominant global energy waste. But to the "local" problem of green compute for IoT / drones / autonomous systems. What's the state of the art in OS dvelopment for high efficiency embedded hardware such as Contiki, Tiny OS, RIOT, Zypher, Mbed and Brillo? And what are the major insights that are missing?

I don't know! Since we're focused on the data center, that's where I have been too. I joined partially for personal growth; this is an area that I don't know as much about as I'd like to. It's only been a few weeks, but I've learned a ton. And there's enough of it in that space that I haven't had as much time or energy to look into other spaces. I do agree that there's a ton of IoTish things, and that it matters.

When you posted about joining Oxide I couldn't quite figure out what they (now you) do by looking at the homepage. I stumbled across this other lecture (https://youtu.be/3LVeEjsn8Ts?t=2189) that is along the same line of thinking, and it started to make sense.

Their podcast, "On the Metal" provides more context at the work they're aiming to accomplish.

Thanks, I'll have to check this out!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com